This invention relates to coring apparatus, and in particular to a novel orientation mechanism and coring tool for soft fruit and the like, particularly having a calyx, such as the strawberry.
In the field of food processing, preparation of fruit and vegetables for freezing, canning or specialty preparations frequently requires removal of the core and additional matter at the stem. While machine coring of apples and other relatively large and rugged produce have been advanced for automatic processing, certain delicate fruit, typified by the strawberry, have provided food machinery developers with vexing problems.
Two of the primary problems are orienting the variously shaped strawberries for the coring step and the design of a coring tool for the delicate skin and meat of the fruit. In the case of the strawberry, coring must extract any attached calyx along with a shallow core. In using the term core, the term is applied to the extraction of the discardable matter without necessarily passing through the top and bottom of the produce.